Thursday, 16 January 2014

The Vircades Project

Vircades Project is a
blog devoted to role-playing games, especially in the science fiction genre. It’s
about stories where hard-bitten criminals and revolutionaries plan corporate
theft and violent heists, where freelance spies dodge surveillance drones and
genemod animals, where every bullet fired from a pistol could drop a character.
It’s about games where cunning and tradecraft and sheer cool overpowers brute
force. Mainly, it’s about cyberpunk.

(But because I play
RPGs, there’ll probably be some D&D stuff in here from time to time…)

What this blog is
about

I love writing
adventures and I love writing NPCs. So this blog will be full of both.

For me, obsessed with
the neo-noir aesthetic, the cyberpunk genre has always – and weirdly – lacked good
heist adventures. So I’m going to post some here (I’m not saying they’re going
to be good, but they will be heists!). It’ll be fun to experiment with formats
after discovering Savage Worlds
adventure paths, the OSR movement and the recent line of Shadowrun plot point adventures!

The idea that
Cyberpunk games are too close to reality to be escapist or fun is a totally
valid one (for the novel and film genre as much as the games!). Part of what I
love about the genre is how it makes the mundane world strange by extrapolating
current trends just a little further. This really manifests itself in the city
where the characters find themselves, and so I want to start writing about
locations and architecture for games. The city of tomorrow doesn’t have to look
like New York in the 1970s (as evocative a place as that was!).

At the time of
writing this I’m running my first ever Shadowrun
campaign, along with irregular Star Wars,
Day after Ragnarok, and DnD Next games. I want/need to run some GUMSHOE as soon as possible. Both the
Star Wars and DaR games went in (wonderful) directions I didn’t expect, so I’ve
got lots of unused material for both those games to post here.

One final narcissistic
thing. For years I’ve been posting on the Views from the Edge Cyberpunk 2020
forum under the name Companero. With the CP2020 community slowly falling away I
don’t want all of that writing to disappear, so I’m probably going to repost a
few things I wrote there, like, seven years ago. Because I can!

Cyberpunk 2020

Sometime over a
decade ago I completed Deus Ex and Planescape Torment and went looking for
some other deep story game fix. Inspired by Datafortress 2020*, I sought out a game
store and asked the guy to recommend me a cyberpunk roleplaying game. He showed
me Spycraft, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020.
At first glance Spycraft was too
dense, full of tables, and lacking in character (I still think that, to be
honest!). Shadowrun was better –
straight away there was a clear setting, a clear aesthetic and idea to get
behind. It looked like a great game.

Cyberpunk 2020 looked like a cultural artefact.
I was a teenager and discovering all of pop culture in a rush, and the punk
zine visuals of that book (however laughably 1980s it was) hooked me straight
away. CP2020 was written with a clear
narrative voice so drenched in the genre conventions that I could practically
hear a Michael Mann/Tangerine Dream soundtrack playing the background.

Also it was eight
pounds cheaper than Shadowrun.

And seventeen pounds cheaper than Spycraft.

It doesn’t really
matter that the rules-as-written were barely functional or actively missing in
large parts, or that the hacking rules needed a total rewrite to fit into the
game at all. It didn’t matter that the sourcebooks (with a couple of brilliant
exceptions) were largely disappointing and that the setting as written was so
boring that I’ve never actually used it. It doesn’t matter that ten years on I
use a version of the game so hacked that it doesn’t much resemble the original.
CP2020 remains my favourite game of any sort.

I’ve since gleefully
(obsessively) mined Shadowrun, Kromosome, Transhuman Space, Ex Machina, ICE Cyberspace, Traveller 2300, Interface Zero, Night’s Black Agents, Stars
Without Number, Jovian Chronicles
and half a dozen other games for ideas and inspiration. And almost always run the resulting cyberpunk mash-up using a hacked version of CP2020.

* Datafortess 2020 is a massive project that now compiles virtually every piece of CP2020 fan material ever posted online. It is also frequently down, so i'll post a link the accompanying blog instead.

"The Vircades Project"

The name of this blog
comes from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the thousand page unfinished
draft of a book that aimed to explicate the Urgeschichte (“primal
history”) of the city of Paris by collating virtually every aspect of
geography, pop culture and revolutionary folklore available. The book is dense,
confusing and largely impenetrable to anyone who (like me!) doesn’t have an encyclopaedic
knowledge of French art and culture in the late 19th century.

I adore it. It
appeals to the part of me that loves abstract pattern recognition,
convoluted social sandbox games, espionage histories, punk zines and walking
enormous distances across the city of London in no particular direction.
Cyberpunk fiction inspired half those fascinations – hence vircades. Like the worlds conjured up in roleplaying games,
vircades are ephemeral, ludic places that will only ever exist in fiction, purely
for the entertainment of the players.